Valentine's Day: shame on you Hallmark

I hate Valentine’s Day.

Maybe it’s the subtle pick pocketing by Hallmark and her partners in crime. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t trust a holiday that forces you buy gifts for someone and doesn’t give you a day off from school. Maybe its just because that kid with the “Reese’s Cup” valentines in elementary school always seemed to forget my valentine…jerk.

Even down to its mascot, Valentine’s Day has always seemed like a kind of shady holiday. Cupid is a naked baby that runs around with a bow and arrows, turning love into his own little game of target practice. In other words, Valentine’s Day chose as its mascot a nudist with an insatiable appetite for drive by shootings.

Yet the thing that shocks me the most about Valentine’s Day is how much it rides on the purchasing of products to keep its own spirit alive. It doesn’t reflect what true romance in the 21st century means. Translation: Valentine’s Day is about buying things, nothing else, period.

Don’t believe me? Try this out:

This Valentine’s Day, don’t buy anything. Don’t buy boxes of chocolate, you're just encouraging your significant other’s weight gain. Don’t buy flowers; they will just die, much like your materialistic relationship.

And certainly don’t get a card, that’s just lazy and superficial. It’s like saying, “Hey, this picture of a butterfly that Hallmark put on this card truly captures the essence of what you mean to me, now eat this candy before your flowers die.”

I will assert however that this experiment would be especially difficult on men, as we as a sex generally fail miserably every February 14th anyway. Admit it, ladies, you watch Kay Jewelers commercials on TV and wonder why your boyfriend or husband can’t propose to you on a park bench at sunset, or give you a diamond necklace wrapped in a box on the back of a baby kitten. The answer is simple: we live in what’s called the “real world”, where buying you expensive jewelry and agreeing to go see Twilight should be enough.

Now I, of course, am seeing this all through the eyes of someone not in a relationship, so obviously I could be missing out on some big secret, but to me that’s kind of what Valentine’s Day stinks, anyway. It’s the only holiday where you must have credentials to be able to party.

I think the truth is that Valentine’s Day is just a badly engineered holiday. It puts anyone in a romantic relationship through the ordeal of gift shopping less than two months after the Christmas season shopping. And it puts everyone else not in a relationship through the ordeal of pondering the meaning of their own existence while listening to Air Supply’s “Everybody Hurts” in the bathtub with scented candles.

So, this Valentine’s Day, take whatever comes with a grain of salt, and remember that romance and true happiness comes not in what society, or anyone else tells you, but by your own measure of your self worth and the true happiness you create in relationships with others. Oh, and if you think about buying a box of chocolates this year, remember that life is like a box of chocolates, the further you get into it, the fatter you feel, the less attractive you become, and the more you realize that it wasn’t worth going to Twilight.